Sunday, September 8, 2013

I've always had a liking of the IdeaPad range from Lenovo from my very first S10-2 to the very latest Z500 which I got very recently . While people think they are inferior in nature to the ThinkPads,I believe they fill the void in the entertainment space since the other range is mostly buisiness centric. From my personal experience and usage of many of the Idea series from 2009 to present, I've seen them evolve over time from design and usage perspective. This time I am sharing some of my personal thoughts about the Z500 from the IdeaPad range.

The first thing when I opened up the box was to see how the thickness of the Z500 had reduced.Also outer part of the screen has a clean design rather than having a pattern which the previous laptops had. Mine was a dark chocolate coloured laptop with clean looking matte finish on the top.

Photo courtesy -- Lenovo India

The Z500 is 25% slimmer than a standard notebook. While that might be true,the weight factor doesn't change much when compared to my older Y560. Lenovo says it is slim and light but being a desktop replacement and a mainstream Multimedia notebook, I am not so sure if its "light" enough. Having said that - I have been happily using it as my primary computer for sometime from running Virtual machines,watching movies and sometimes exploring the features of Windows 8 ( Mine was a touch model) so the kind of interaction you have with the system via touch is quite amazing. While the 15.6 inches HD screen is a boon in the making, the choice of switching between Discreet and Integrated graphics gives us the advantage of not sacrificing the battery life at the cost of the performance.

Keyboards have also evolved in the IdeaPads.My previous Y560's keyboard was a delight to type on for long hours. The tactile feedback was good and I feel the same about the Z500 whose keyboard style has changed to island style which are slightly raised. Its a different experience when coming from the older keyboard type but you do get used to it over time. Another surprise was the full size keyboard with the dedicated number pad. Yay! Great job there Lenovo! . Oh and to mention that it comes with a backlight option just made some of my friends feel envy towards me ;) .

Having Windows 8 with a slimmer desktop replacement like this feels good . I am waiting for Windows 8.1 to comeout since it is a more polished version and hopefully that would complete some of the void that are present in Windows 8 .